Connie Willis - Fire Watch

There was no one in the park. Meg wiped a swing dry with the tail of her coat and set Laynie gently going back and forth. She made a circuit of the park, avoiding puddles and forth. She made a circuit of the park, avoiding puddles and thinking it was an awfully small town to have two missiles. This one was not anything like the needle-shaped red, white, and blue one the Chamber of Commerce had. It was short and squat and a painfully nondescript pale khaki color. Army surplus. It had no markings to identify it, but along one side were long, scraggly marks that looked as if they had been scrawled in charcoal. Local graffiti, Meg thought, and moved closer.

It wasn’t graffiti unless it had been put on with a blowtorch. The long row of hash marks had been burned onto the side of the missile. They were slightly uneven in length: Laynie’s idea of writing. At the end of the line was a circle with more hash marks radiating from it. The circle reminded her of something, but she couldn’t think what.

“Rocket,” Laynie said.

“No, honey it’s a missile.” Actually, it did look a little like a rocket.

“Rocket,” Laynie repeated. She was standing behind Meg, in a puddle. Meg couldn’t see the tops of her boots.

“Oh, Laynie,” Meg said. “Your good boots!” She helped her out of the puddle.

“Boots!” Laynie wailed. “Wet!”

“Oh, honey,” Meg said, and picked her up. “Let’s go change into your sneakers, okay? Your pretty red sneakers, okay?”

Laynie sniffed. “Wet.”

“I know.” It seemed like a long way back to the motel. “Let’s pretend we’re in a rocket,” Meg said to distract Laynie. “Where shall we go?”

“Tana,” Laynie said.

“Montana? Meg laughed. “Why?”

“See clips,” Laynie said solemnly.

Meg stopped in the middle of the street and looked back at the park.

By the time Meg got Laynie into dry socks and the red sneakers, it was nearly three-thirty, which meant the questions should be over and the scheduled movie started. Laynie was very good in movies, no matter what they were about, so Meg decided to risk meeting Rich. Thank goodness it was a little town. The high school was only two blocks farther than the park, perched on the top of a hill. The Chamber of Commerce had recommended it as the best viewing site for tomorrow.

Meg had guessed wrong about the movie. They were still asking questions. Rich and Paulos were halfway down the auditorium and in the middle of a row. Meg decided against trying to get to them and sat down in an empty seat almost at the back. She helped Laynie out of her snowsuit and handed her a package of gum.

“Clips?” Laynie asked.

“Not yet,” Meg said, “but there’ll be a movie soon.” I hope. She tried to tell from the questions being asked how near they were to being finished, but it was impossible to tell anything. The questions were a jumble about shadow bands, welder’s glass, mylar film, Bailey’s beads. Meg had the feeling from the look on the face of the man leading the discussion that some of the questions had been asked before. He was probably a teacher, because he didn’t know how to hold the microphone right. He was certainly a scientist. He had a calculator and five pencils in his shirt pocket. His pants came almost to the top of his socks.

Meg wondered idly where her four scientists were. She didn’t see them in the crowd, though there were several Stetsons and one fluorescent orange deerstalker. And a million parkas. If Holubar were sponsoring the eclipse, Meg thought, this is what it would look like. Laynie stood on her seat and offered gum to the elderly couple behind her.

The science teacher finally stopped one of the redheaded boys in mid-question and started the movie. It was a National Geographic film of an eclipse out in the ocean somewhere. The scientist who did the narration was the spitting image of Meg’s four. He even had on an orange-flowered Hawaiian shirt. He talked for fifteen minutes about the mechanics of eclipses while Laynie stared raptly at the screen, not even chewing her gum.

“The fact that solar eclipses occur at all is due to a coincidence unique in the solar system, as far as we know, unique in our whole celestial neighborhood. It’s all due to the diameter of the moon, which is three thousand four hundred eighty kilometers, being point oh oh two five times the diameter of the sun, which is…” He was off again, working out chalky equations. Laynie loved it. The gist of it, Meg gathered, was not that there were eclipses, since everything in the universe must sooner or later manage to get in the way of everything else and ruin the view. The amazing coincidence part was that the sun and the moon were an exact geometric fit, so that instead of just darkness there were the corona, the prominences, all the show that people came from miles around to see.

Laynie had to go to the bathroom. Meg trekked her down a locker-lined hall and nearly collided with her scientists. They brushed past her and out a side door onto the schools tennis courts. The courts were heaped with black snow, but they commanded an unbroken view of the sky.

Meg could see now what they had been arguing about. The sky was still clear, with only a few delicate cirrus clouds above the dipping sun, and that threatening line of clouds had disappeared. But there was a faint haze to the west that Meg recognized now as weather coming. A big front, too. It might be overcast by as early as tonight. So why weren’t the four worried?

They did not look worried at all. The argument was coming near to being resolved, Meg thought, watching them through the door, because their expressions were nearly in agreement and their gesturing was on a smaller and more soothing scale. In fact, Meg thought, they looked a little smug, like Rich and Paulos when they had found the mistake in the program and could now go full speed ahead without interference. She wondered what the weather report for tomorrow would be. I don’t need to hear, she thought irrationally, I already know. She, watched them through the door for a few more minutes and then took Laynie to the bathroom.

The questioning in the auditorium went on for almost another hour after the movie, during which time Laynie went through two more packs of gum and a roll of Lifesavers the old couple behind gave her. Meg decided they were saints sent down from heaven to help young mother’s through the eclipse. If heaven wasn’t too far to come, Meg thought idly while the man with the microphone held forth on the construction of a pinhole viewer from a shoebox, how far was too far to come?

Everyone who had been in the auditorium was in the cafe and then some. The special was something called an “eclipse burger,” which turned out to be a hamburger with a fried egg and cheese on top. Laynie took the top bun off and refused to eat anything else. Rich and Paulos talked about the weather while Meg scraped egg and cheese off Laynie’s hamburger. They hadn’t noticed the haze yet.

“Do you realize how far some of these people have come?” Rich said. “That guy that was sitting next to us was from New York. He drove out.”

“Yeah, if it’s cloudy tomorrow, there are going to be some mighty unhappy people,” Paulos said.

“Ick,” Laynie said, pointing to the yellow mess beside her hamburger. Meg scraped the offending goo onto her own plate.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that if you had come far enough you would have some way of ensuring that the weather was clear.” She put the top bun on the hamburger and handed it to Laynie. Rich and Paulos were looking at her as if she had lost her mind.

“You mean cloudseeding?” Rich said finally.

“I just-exactly how far do you think people actually come to something like this?”